Hard Disk Storage 1985

[RobK_NL]

Probably lighter too; over 20kg IIRC. We also did the 3380, which were even larger and heavier.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

I'd love to have one of those.

[RobK_NL]

Only have two platters and a head assembly, sorry

[rrinker]

 And that's just the drive, you should see the motor that spins it!

One of the places I worked had a huge IBM 390 (and clone) data center, 13TB of DASD took up one huge room, the processors were in another. I have more than 13TB in my mini-tower server at home.

   

[duak]

I got a 15 Mb Honeywell hard drive with a pack in 1978.  It used late 60's technology and was about the size of a washing machine.  The controller/formatter was apparently about the size of a fridge.  I was able to spin up the drive and load the heads and see some data with a 'scope.  The head actuator was hydraulic and was driven off the spindle by a big flat belt and was about as loud as a Shop-vac.  I later worked with an ex-DEC guy that said that the flat belt often fell off when it collected enough oil.  If it was writing at the time it would first overwrite the data with longer bits and then grind off the oxide as the heads moved away from that cylinder and stopped flying.

I saved the frame for a work table and used the motor for a grinder.  I'm thinking of using the spindle for something like a surface grinder.  I took the pack apart and found two roached platters where the heads crashed.

In late 1980 I got one of the first Shugart (not Seagate) 8" hard disks with, count 'em, 4 Mb.  With the SASI (precursor to SCSI) controller it came to about $2K.  I was playing with assemblers and a C complier at the time and it reduced run times by about 60-80% over dual 8" floppies.  I last ran it about 10 years later and it still worked.  It was a hoot to boot into CP/M in less than a second.  I still have it and one of these days I might try it again.  Any comments on whether the heads might peel the oxide off the platter because it hasn't been used for so long?  It didn't have a dedicated landing zone but I always tried to set it over the innermost cylinder when shutting it off.

I'd say that by 1985 small disks were commodities and the price per bit really started to drop.  Weren't there like over 20 manufacturers of small disk drives about then?

Cheers,

[james_s]

1985 sounds about right, the IBM XT had been on the market for a couple years by then and clone manufactures were popping up like dandelions. Hard drives were still expensive, but 10-20MB drives had come down in price to the point where a good number of computer users could afford the convenience of having one.

It wasn't until the mid 2000's though that capacities really started to overtake demand. These days it's pretty much only serious photographers and media hoarders who need more than the smallest commodity drives on the market. Used to be a top of the line drive was filled to the brim within a year or two.

[joeqsmith]

I knew a gentleman that worked on a drum drive.  The was quite a large system.  He told a story about how it came apart one time.   The first hard drive I used with the PC was a Corvus.  At the time I had a drive made by Data General that had a removable 14" pack and a fixed drive on one spindle.  This was used on a Nova 3.    We also had a hard drive from Hewlett Packard that used HPIB.  The was physically very large and had the platters mounted vertically.   

This picture show with one of my early turbo AT clones.   The disk drives are to the right and are larger than the AT.  Tape drive is just above them on the far right. That's my Summa Graphics optical mouse.  None of that ball crap.     

I still have a Seagate 5.25" 20M ST225 in operation inside my oldest DSO. 

[rsjsouza]

From various old computer magazines I have read: early CD drives were very expensive, even 1x ones, let alone 2x and 3x.

Anecdotal story about early CD burners: having no buffer or ability to handle physical disruption.  The former meant your computer could not be used whilst burning.  The latter meant bumping the table ruined a whole burn.  All at low burn speeds

I still remember having access to the IT department of my university and they had a Kodak PCD 225 Writer that could write at 2x and interfaced via SCSI-1 with its exclusive PC host running Windows 3.11 and Corel CD Creator 1 (the later version 2.0 was much more reliable).

Whenever we were burning a CD (US$20.00 a pop), the table was not to be touched and the computer was not to be fiddled with. Still, we lost 25% of the CDs recorded then.

Another area that was quite sensitive was extracting audio from an audio CD - any keypress on the host PC and the resulting .wav file was full of pops and clicks.

One year earlier we had bought our first CD ROM drive (a Toshiba 4x caddy CD drive with SCSI-1 interface - similar to this one) that was incredibly reliable and could read terribly scratched CDs. For a brief time I connected it to a Sound Blaster card that had a SCSI-1 interface. 

[CJay]

I had a circular saw that looked less scary than that 

Emergency retract on those things could leave fingerprints (and fingers) on the platters.

My first CD-ROM reader was a 2x SCSI with caddy and in an external case, it was 'bought' for the bargain price of a dozen capacitors that needed replacing in the PSU, it had been tossed as unrepairable by a client who'd paid the wrong side of £400 for it.

I've had HDDs back to 20MB MFM and repaired older 5MB Rodimes, replacing individual heads and platters in them

[james_s]

I remember how exciting it was when my friend got a 2x CD burner, I think it cost him $500 at the time. The blank discs were $10 each and the slightest glitch would cause it to make a coaster. I'm not sure why they didn't have some sort of buffer, RAM was expensive but not *that* expensive. I guess the drives were already do expensive without it.

[tooki]

Well, and not long after the 2x burners became common, buffer RAM did become common, and grew in capacity (all the way up to 16MB in the Yamaha 4416, IIRC). Not long after that, somebody figured out how to make CD burners that could interrupt recording and pick up again where they left off (leaving just a few bad bits that the drive ignored as dust on reading). Between that and superior computers and OSes that could handle the data streams better, the need for the large buffers diminished, and CD burners reverted to 2MB buffers. DVD-R drives mostly use 8MB I think.

[james_s]

Given a write speed of 300kBps for a 2x drive it surprises me that a buffer of 2MB was not more than sufficient. I know computers were a lot slower back then but even so, I don't fully understand why it was such a challenge to keep a burner fed with steady data.

[bd139]

Mainly due to the shitty IO subsystem that infested windows 9x variants.

[rsjsouza]

And before that, Windows 3.x releases and their "cooperative" multitasking were absolutely appalling. Poorly written drivers and applications completely hijacked the system at times - it was not uncommon for the Corel CD Creator SW to freeze when it was starved of ACKs from the drive. 

[tooki]

And in all fairness, the Macs of the era were only trivially better. In classic Mac OS you couldn’t dare try and burn in the background, at least not on burners without huge buffers. (Mac OS X could do it quite well.)

I think a lot of the problem with burning in the early days was that you weren’t just streaming a finished disc image to the burner. You were burning discs of files, and those files could be anywhere on the disk, and could be fragmented. (Windows back then was AWFUL about fragmentation.) So you could have a horribly fragmented file that had to be burned, but turned out to be in so many pieces that seeking to them reduced throughout to below the speed the burner needed.

[bd139]

Ugh classic macs were vile creations. I refused to poke them until Unix appeared underneath.

Just a point that windows fragmentation is still awful now on NTFS by design. Try burning lots of small files. Due to small files being stored in the MFT it causes masses of IO contention that can bring even a nice enterprise SSD to its knees.

You can watch this in action with WSL on windows 10. On the same hardware it takes nearly 40x the time to do an initial grep of the Linux kernel source compared the the same thing on native ext4/Linux install. When it is cached on both platforms it’s a lot faster but windows is then 40x slower due to the cost of NT system calls instead.

[james_s]

I never liked Macs back in the day but then ended up with a number of different 68k Macs in my collection alongside some similar age PC hardware. I have to say, the Macs were so far ahead of the PC stuff of that era it's not even funny, there's just no contest. 640x480 or higher with 8 bit color, multi-monitor capable, plug & play that worked, clean polished UI, mice/keyboards that could be daisy chained, onboard SCSI, 3.5" floppies with electric eject that detect disc insertion, built in 8 bit audio in the early ones, 16 bit stereo later. With exception of the low cost consumer models the hardware design is slick, resembling that of high end workstations. A Mac II from 1987 makes a 286 DOS PC look like an antique relic. You could pop 6 video cards in the Mac and connect 6 different monitors, everything would auto-detect and configure and it would boot up with each monitor set to the proper resolution, I didn't see proper multi-monitor on PCs until Windows NT and it was tricky to set up.

The downside is they were very expensive, and they sort of stagnated while PCs steadily improved and eventually surpassed them in most ways.

[BravoV]

Favorite keystrokes ... >g c800:5 

And most optimal MFM interleave = 4 for "turbo" enabled CPU. 

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

You could pop 6 video cards in the Mac and connect 6 different monitors, everything would auto-detect and configure and it would boot up with each monitor set to the proper resolution, I didn't see proper multi-monitor on PCs until Windows NT and it was tricky to set up.

My own Apple II+ had four green phosphor CRT screens, back in 1980 when there was no IBM PCs nor Macs yet. One was the built in video, the other three were Videx Videoterms. In theory I could have had 8 screens in total: built in video + 7 Videoterms.

[CJay]

I never liked Macs back in the day but then ended up with a number of different 68k Macs in my collection alongside some similar age PC hardware. I have to say, the Macs were so far ahead of the PC stuff of that era it's not even funny, there's just no contest. 640x480 or higher with 8 bit color, multi-monitor capable, plug & play that worked, clean polished UI, mice/keyboards that could be daisy chained, onboard SCSI, 3.5" floppies with electric eject that detect disc insertion, built in 8 bit audio in the early ones, 16 bit stereo later. With exception of the low cost consumer models the hardware design is slick, resembling that of high end workstations. A Mac II from 1987 makes a 286 DOS PC look like an antique relic. You could pop 6 video cards in the Mac and connect 6 different monitors, everything would auto-detect and configure and it would boot up with each monitor set to the proper resolution, I didn't see proper multi-monitor on PCs until Windows NT and it was tricky to set up.

The downside is they were very expensive, and they sort of stagnated while PCs steadily improved and eventually surpassed them in most ways.

I worked on a lot of that era's Mac hardware, had some very nice 680x0 in circuit emulators, about £60K worth eventually, the 68000 pod didn't work well with them because they did multitasking properly in hardware and the pod designers had been lazy/cheap so it failed pretty early in the Mac ROM initialisation process but the rest were a dream to use.

The Macs were wonderfully designed and built hardware but what a crappy company to have dealings with, we got a few stern letters and injunctions to try and get us out of the Mac repair business, Apple *really* don't like competition.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

They soon realized that with open systems like the Apple II people were buying not Apple's but third parties' expansion cards, which were either cheaper or simply better than their own. The Apple /// was a first (failed) step towards a closed system, and the Mac further more. Jeez, with the II you got commented ROM listings and the schematics and even hand written notes by Woz, with enough info to understand how the whole damn thing worked and to design your own expansion/peripheral cards if you wanted, which clearly was something against their own interests.

[bd139]

This is one reason I liked Acorn and bought into their ecosystem back then. Apart from the platform crapping on everything from space (32-bit ARM in 1987!), you could get a reference manual for every piece of hardware they sold which contained service information, schematics, memory maps, the lot. The whole platform was open and everyone could build peripherals for it or modify the OS and system.

Typical example:

Hardware: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manuals/Acorn_A4001R140SM.pdf
Software: http://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/

Random nostalgia trip... ARM assembly hello world

[Naguissa]

Hahaha I had one like that. 20Mb MFM drive.

Does anyone remember CD drives with caddies?

Starting to feel old now. 

I remember my 2x cdrom on a 486 that you pushed it and nostly all drive came out. Then, you open the upper part like a boombox to access the disc.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[james_s]

The Macs were wonderfully designed and built hardware but what a crappy company to have dealings with, we got a few stern letters and injunctions to try and get us out of the Mac repair business, Apple *really* don't like competition.

Can't argue with you there. Apple as a company is not something I've ever been fond of, well not since the early days of the Apple II anyway. Unlike many people though, I'm able to separate Apple products from Apple the company, and I can appreciate well designed products even if I'm not fond of the company.

Really in the case of Apple it's the cult like dedication of a portion of their customer base that I find distasteful. Waiting in line for hours to get the latest iPhone? No thanks, I'll order last year's model at steep discount online and have it in my hand a day or two later without any hassle.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Random nostalgia trip... ARM assembly hello world

  That's a true Archimedes? A Raspberry? Please bring forward the source code window, I'm curious!